Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  “That’s right,” Martin said. Like he shouldn’t have to say any more than that.

  “That’s a lot to go through, keeping your face on all the time,” I said. “They can’t be doing it just to fit in—it wouldn’t be worth it. You have any idea what this Benton could be planning?”

  “Not now we don’t,” Johnny said, softly. “But you already said the magic words, Dell. And you can take this to the bank: we will.”

  “That’s a bank that doesn’t draw interest,” Martin added, just in case I missed the point.

  “I don’t want Dolly to know,” I said, just in case they had.

  “Can you say why?” Martin asked.

  “Yeah. Dolly’s no good at keeping emotions off her face. She’s already sorry she even told me what Benton said to her.”

  “And if something were to—”

  “That’s enough,” I told them both.

  “We’re entitled to protect Dolly, too. We’re obligated to. You don’t say you love someone—and we do love her!—and not stand ready to prove it.”

  “You already are,” I assured them. “There’s things you’re good at that I couldn’t ever learn to do. And there’s some things I’m good at. We’re each working our part of the job.”

  “And what we don’t know won’t hurt us?” Johnny said, half sulking.

  “It won’t hurt Dolly,” I answered, handing him a blank business card with a burner-cell number on the back. “Okay?”

  We shook hands. All of us.

  I believed them. And I knew they believed me.

  Now I knew.

  —

  On the drive back, I kept thinking how most folks would think being gay was something you’d hide, not fake.

  But, the more I thought about it, the better I understood—or, at least, thought I could understand—why MaryLou had played that role all through high school. And how Franklin could sense things even if he couldn’t spell them.

  Dolly wasn’t home. I went right to the basement, snapped together the machine, and…Yes. While I’d been away, the ghost had visited.

  |<(1) Confidential senders all ID’ed at their end. (2) Member added 2009 = R/N Rhonda Jayne Johnson. S/N changes, floating IP. DOB = 2/2/19A7. Contacts back-channel for PNW, ongoing. Approved for >< question-phase, check-out ><*only*. Grad O State U this year. Concentration: economics. Also: coaching athletics, empha soccer. Accept’d MA program.>|

  Then a lengthy list of vitals, from birth certificate to transcript to address. And a photograph.

  There was something off about the photograph, but I couldn’t put a name to it. I knew better than to try and print anything off the machine—it didn’t have a connector port, and any message would disappear within a minute or so after the ghost’s system would tell him I’d viewed it. I needed that time to copy off the information.

  I did that. Then I stared at the photograph until the machine blinked off. I wouldn’t need a printout to keep the image in my head. The career Olaf had started me on had forced me to learn that skill. Being caught with weapons could always be explained. But a photo of the target, that would do its own talking. Whoever was in such a photograph was soon to be dead, and clients of professional assassins expected anonymity to be part of every contract.

  Dolly wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t come to bed. Sometimes, I can’t sleep—not with film strips being pulled across the underside of my eyelids, forcing me to watch a slow-motion movie. Most of the time, I could follow the script. Could be something I’d done that I wasn’t proud of. Or something that had been done to me. I had to watch.

  But a replay of whatever my life had been before the “retrograde amnesia” the doctors in that clinic had told me I already had when I was brought in—that had never come up on the screen. Still it could, I told myself. Maybe that veil would lift. Maybe I could learn…I don’t know what. Or even why I cared.

  After a while—I don’t know how long I’d been there, and they wouldn’t tell me—I left. I always thought of it as “escaped,” but there really was no security, not even a fence. The drop from my window was cushioned by the soft, carefully tended grass. It was dark, but you could hear the shadows. Some of the other kids said those shadows were grown-ups who had been there for years and years, wandering the grounds after night came. I wasn’t afraid of shadows. Not afraid enough to remain caged, anyway.

  From some place in Belgium to the gutters of Paris. A different kind of cold. A ravenous wind always blowing. Then Luc found me.

  I used to think about what I’d do if ever I found that “clinic.” I knew things now that no child could ever know. I had skills no child could ever be taught. Tools no child could ever use. I could make whoever was in charge tell me whatever I wanted to know…if they knew it themselves.

  I was good at that. One time, I was alone in a hotel’s penthouse suite with a man who owned the hotel, and a dozen more like it. He was rich enough to travel the world on his yacht; he kept private jets in different places, and employed a security force powerful enough to overthrow some small countries. I needed to know where and when a massive arms shipment was to be delivered. If he wouldn’t tell me, I’d put a venom-tipped round into his brain.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said, not a hint of anxiety on his face or in his hands. “You kill me and you’ll never get out of here alive. And even if you managed that…You’re a professional—you have to know you’re already on video. You’d be hunted down sooner or later. Then you’d be boiled to death like a lobster.”

  “I get the coordinates, or you get dead,” I said, just as calmly. I had good reason to be: A man who buys too much security never thinks that what he paid for, another could pay for as well. Pay much more—traitors don’t come cheap. That’s why my job was to get the information and pass it on over the sat-phone I had with me. Then put the rich man to sleep.

  But the threat to kill him was a bluff. Dead, the traitor inside his organization would be of no more value to the people who had hired me.

  “You can kill me, I suppose,” he said. “But you’d just be killing yourself, don’t you see that?”

  “I won’t ask you again.”

  “Didn’t you hear a word I said? Are you insane?”

  “Not as long as the shot they gave me is still working,” I answered his question. “I kind of know what it is, some mixture of lithium and Thorazine, some other stuff, too, I think. But I don’t know the formula. Only they do. That’s why I have to do this. They’re the only ones who can keep the voices away, so I have to do what they say.”

  My voice had already started to wobble, so I made a concentrated effort to separate my words. The rich man didn’t miss what he thought I was trying to hide.

  “Please…” is all I could get out by then.

  I could see inside his head just as he thought he could see inside mine. This man is a lunatic. A robot. What’s one arms shipment, anyway? Not worth my life.

  He told me. I let him hear me speak it into the phone, my voice barely getting the words out.

  And then I got out. But not before I put a flat metal box on his desk.

  Even if that clinic still existed, even if I could find it, it was all so long ago. I could think of a hundred reasons why no records about me would still exist. And not a single one why they would.

  —

  I learned this very early in my life: all knowledge isn’t power.

  I might know how to break into a fortress, but if I didn’t know where the fortress was…

  So I knew a lot of things I’d probably never have a use for, but that didn’t mean I’d ever throw them out. A man I served with told us that New York cab drivers who were Sikhs would always be left-handed. Nobody had to ask him why that was so; he wasn’t drunk enough to fall over, but he’d had enough liquor to believe that we were all spellbound by his stories.

  “See, all Sikhs have to carry this little curved knife in their turbans. It’s a religious thing with them. Now, all the cabs have these bul
letproof shields behind the front seat. So you can’t do nothing from back there. What a robber does, he jumps out as soon as the cab stops, then he walks around to the driver’s window, holding out money, like he never saw the slot in the shield, see? The driver rolls down his window, and the robber pulls his piece. Or a razor, or whatever. Now, a Sikh, he’ll have his own blade out and a big rip in your arm before you can blink. But, see, that only works if his blade is on his left, ’cause that’s the side he’ll have closest to the window.”

  I knew I’d probably never have a use for that, even if what the loose-mouth told us had been the truth.

  “How come he didn’t have an accent?” I asked Olaf later. “He said he was from New York, but—”

  “If he was from Brooklyn, or Queens, you would hear an accent. But if he was raised in Manhattan, his voice would sound the same as if he was raised in Chicago, or Cleveland. It’s not like being from Boston—that carries an accent that does not depend on what part of the city you grew up in.”

  “Oh” is all I said. That was enough—it was usually what I said after Olaf told me something.

  But that photograph…

  —

  “He says, if we give him an image that’s already online, he can find out a lot more.”

  Mack, repeating what the video ninja told him.

  The only image I had was in my head, not online. And, somehow, I knew even if that photo was online there wouldn’t be a match.

  Something off, but I couldn’t feel my way through to it.

  I knew her name, where she went to school. I’ve hunted down men with far less information.

  But jungle law always came first. “It is not tracks that will give you away.” Part of Olaf’s legacy—he’d known he couldn’t tell me everything in the time he had left, so he’d focused on correcting mistakes before I made them.

  “Even a fool knows not to leave trail signs after he has finished his work,” he said. “It is the entrance you must control. You already know about things like trip wires, land mines, deadfalls. That is not enough to protect you when you work outside this environment.

  “When you hunt in a densely populated area, even your vibrations must be masked. Every question you ask sends out tremors—you cannot know how far they reach, but every pattern you disturb is a potential alert to your target.

  “An alerted target may flee, or may lie in wait. It is never enough to move silently. You must be beyond quiet, beyond stealth. That means any job with a time limitation, you refuse.”

  Around here, a Subaru is so common it wouldn’t be noticed. But if I told Dolly I needed to use her car too many times, she’d notice. Mack’s car was a generic, once—now it was so torn up that it might as well be flying a flag. Franklin would lend me his truck in a second, but the license plate would be a problem. Martin would lend me one of his rides, only none of them would work for what I had to do.

  If I traveled without a car, it would take me longer. That wasn’t a problem. Longer to get there—so what? But not being able to leave quickly—that could keep me in a place I didn’t want to be.

  —

  “Let me make sure I understand this,” MaryLou said.

  Her tone was more suspicious than friendly. Still, I’d already told her this was all part of protecting Dolly, so she’d hear me out.

  “You want to…have a look at…this girl, only you can’t let her see you, and you can’t go around asking questions, either. Am I right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you came to see me because…?”

  “Because I don’t know anything about colleges. Campuses, things like that. I could never look like I belong, like a student or a teacher. I don’t know how to talk like they do. I might as well paint myself green.”

  “That could work,” she said.

  “If you don’t want to—”

  “Jeez, you really are an alien! What I meant was, that’s one of the school’s colors. They’re so sports-crazed that if someone was walking around wearing a duck’s-head mask, the campus security people wouldn’t even get a call.”

  “But how…?”

  “It was a joke, okay? I should have known you wouldn’t get it. You probably don’t even have a sense of humor.”

  “I probably don’t,” I admitted. “But I don’t need one, not for this.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Your help.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to help me with your mind. You know what I want. Can you tell me anything that would help me get it?”

  MaryLou was quiet for a minute. I could see her thoughts: This is a dangerous man. But not a sarcastic one. He wouldn’t waste time coming around to play games. He scares me, but…his word is good. He keeps his promises. And this is for Dolly.

  “Let me think for a couple of minutes.”

  I didn’t move. She hadn’t been asking permission, and I couldn’t go wrong being quiet.

  “You’re dressed okay,” she finally said. “You mind being my father for today?”

  I shook my head “no.”

  “I drove Franklin to work, so we can use his truck. It’s not that long a drive.”

  “Just tell me what to do,” I said.

  She stood up and looked me over, carefully. “Are you carrying a gun? I can’t see it if you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll have to—”

  “I’m carrying a permit, too.”

  “Let’s go” is all she said, plucking the keys to Franklin’s truck from a hook screwed into the wall by the door.

  —

  “If they see me looking around, they won’t think twice about it. And this woman, she wants to be a soccer coach, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Well, if anyone in the athletics department recognizes me, I’ll just tell them my father drove me down to give the place the once-over.”

  “Like you’d be transferring, maybe?”

  “Sure!” she sneered in sarcasm. “They’ve got a super football program, and they support the holy hell out of track-and-field, too. But if you want the best deal for girls’ softball, you want the Southwest. Texas, Arizona…like that. Still, I could be getting married….”

  “That makes sense.”

  “The story?”

  “I didn’t think it was a story.”

  The sun turned her blue eyes even paler as she half-turned from her position behind the wheel. “It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “The whole town stood up for you, MaryLou. You think they wouldn’t want you back?”

  “I don’t want to be back. This place…”

  I kept quiet. MaryLou didn’t have a reason in the world to ever return to where every memory was a lie or a terror. If it wasn’t for Franklin, she’d probably never even cross the border. Franklin, he’d follow MaryLou into Hell wearing a gasoline overcoat if she asked him. But she never would. And the only place where Franklin would ever feel like his world was in balance was working for Spyros.

  Another puzzle. For another time.

  —

  MaryLou rolled Franklin’s truck into the parking lot, zipped down the window, and handled the security guy as easy as she handled anyone who stepped into the batter’s box against her.

  “Which way to the softball team?”

  “You mean, like, the locker room?”

  “No, I mean the field,” she snapped off, just short of bratty. “I’m here to see Coach Marrone.”

  “Oh. Well, she’ll be in her office, this time of day.”

  “And that would be…where?”

  The guard pulled a laminated map from a side pocket, mused over it for a second, then said, “You want Building Nine. Just walk to the other side of the lot; there’s one of these ‘You Are Here’ things, and you can—”

  “Thanks,” MaryLou said, as if she’d just been mollified. And just in time, too.

  —

&
nbsp; “This isn’t the way to Building Nine,” I said.

  “I’m not going there. And neither are you,” she told me, taking my arm the way a daughter might, giving me one of those “I can’t take you anywhere, can I?” looks to complete the picture.

  We ended up outside a stand-alone brick structure. It was so covered with different signs, I couldn’t even figure out what it was for.

  “Fan stuff,” MaryLou said, reading my mind.

  “They’ll have…?”

  “Yes. Or tell me where to find one. School’s over. The girl you want, she’s a grad, right? This year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait for me outside. Don’t lurk—stroll around, but don’t go far.”

  —

  “Got it,” she told me.

  I wasn’t sure what she’d gotten, but that leather bag of hers was big enough to carry a twenty-kilo package of heroin, and she was strong enough to swing it like it was empty. Her body language told me we should get going.

  “Here,” MaryLou said, reaching inside her bag, and handing me a book with heavily padded covers and “2015” in huge gold letters on the front.

  “What am I…?”

  “It’s a yearbook. Her picture will be in it. Probably alphabetical order. I couldn’t open it up to check while they were looking at me.”

  I knew the girl would look older than her classmates—the ghost’s info put her in her late twenties—but I wasn’t prepared for such a severe separation from “student.”

  The inside photos were in color, with stuff like “Debate Club” under each one. Rhonda Jayne Johnson was dressed like a businesswoman in her mid-thirties, dark hair pulled back into what I guessed was some kind of bun, dark lipstick making her lips thinner than I expected, sharp cheekbones. And not smiling.

  The photograph the ghost had sent was a girl maybe half the age of the one in the yearbook. In that one, her hair had been fixed into two long pigtails, and she was wearing some kind of school uniform—a blazer with a crest over her left breast. Her lips were much fuller, face a little softer, more rounded.

  But it was the same Rhonda Jayne Johnson, beyond doubt.

  Then it hit me. The photo the ghost had sent didn’t make sense. He would have known I’d need to recognize her by sight. And the dates didn’t match, either: how did some schoolgirl get herself cleared to drop info into the Undercurrents funnel?